The Schubert Ensemble,
celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, presented as the culmination of its Kings
Place celebrations, a programme comprising eight of the forty-five works it has
commissioned, one of which, Edward Rushton’s Piano Quartet, received its world
premiere. All eight works received performances of which both players and
composers should have been proud; indeed, all but one of the composers, John
Woolrich – well, two, if we count one Johann Sebastian Bach – were present in
the audience to hear for themselves.

Huw Watkins’s Piano Quartet,
premiered at last year’s Spitalfields Festival, emerged as a predictably
accomplished single-movement work. Well-crafted and somewhat elegiac in
character, its motivic design and working were audibly apparent throughout,
doubtless a facet of performance as well as work. I was put in mind of (neo-)Prokofiev
at times, though without a second hearing or – preferably – a viewing of the
score, I am not sure that I could claim that to be more than a personal correspondence
drawn. Joe Cutler’s Slippery Music,
first performed at the Cheltenham Festival, opened arrestingly, that opening
dominated by often high-lying violin, here played with especial verve by Simon
Blendis, and piano. The piece struck me as a highly imaginative – and successfully
so – employment of the apparently classical formation of the piano quartet, to
heightened ‘dramatic’ ends, yet without an obvious ‘programme’. Even knocking
on the wood of the instruments was integrated, not a mere ‘effect’. Edward
Rushton’s Piano Removal 2, also for
piano quartet, was more overtly programmatic, its five parts corresponding to
the shipping of Robert Louis Stevenson’s piano from Edinburgh to the island of
Upolu. The first part, with pounding pianoforte and ‘raucous’ – the composer’s
word – strings was perhaps the most noteworthy, at least on a first hearing.

If I found myself a little
underwhelmed by Rushton’s piece – such is generally the nature of such new
music ‘compilation’ programmes – then Bach chorales, courtesy of John Woolrich,
delighted, the ensemble now completed by the arrival of double bassist Peter
Buckoke. Not for the first time I found myself lamenting how, in these days of
ultra-authenticke puritanism, often the only way we are permitted to hear Bach
on modern instruments is in transcription, but that is an issue for another
day. Woolrich’s often dark reimagination, not unlike that of Ulysses Awakes for Monteverdi, proves
faithful and unfaithful, as any true Bach performance should. Tones of Bach’s
piano concertos seemed subliminally present in performance, whilst his harmonic
genius both shines through in itself and inspires his collaborator(s). Pavel
Zemek Novák’s Unisono takes material from
various members of the Bach family and presents it in unison, but in some ways
transformed rhythmically as well as texturally. If ultimately it does not seem
to amount to a great deal more than the sum of its parts, it does not overstay
its welcome, and made for a welcome divertissement.

For David Knotts’s Night Song and Garden Quadrille, we lost
our pianist. The composer’s programme description opened, ‘I wanted to write a
piece which focused on Judy Kleinman’s love of gardening,’ surely the only time
that sentence has been formed, whether musically or otherwise. The reference
was to Daniel Kleinman’s commission for the birthday of his wife, Judy. The dancing
quality of the music indeed seemed matched by its sense of the outdoors, not a
wild Romantic landscape, but the manageable, familiar yet always fascinating,
world of the garden. David Matthews’s Tango,
piano regained, followed in similar vein, an arrangement of the fourth movement
of Matthews’s Fourth Symphony. If it seemed more of an occasional work than
anything more substantial, there will doubtless always be a call for the
former. Martin Butler’s American Rounds,
by contrast, sounded over-extended: fine if sub-Copland Americana is your
thing, but with apparently little else to engage. It was performed with
considerable brilliance, though, and much of the audience seemed to love it.